How did the missionaries look at Environment?

Dr. Sebastian Joseph delivered an invited lecture at the UGC National seminar on ‘Rethinking of colonial and missionary interventions in the making of Modern Kerala’ organised by the Department  of History, CMS College, Kottayam. In his paper, Environment and the Missionary Gaze, Dr. Sebastian made a textual analysis of ‘The Hill Arrians of Travancore’, a book authored by Henry Baker Jr and attempted to unravel the gaze of the European missionary within the rubric of colonial discourses on environment and land use in Travancore. Was the missionary a tool of the colonial government or had he portrayed certain strategies and attitudes different from that of the coloniser? What is the use of the reports and other writings of the missionaries for the environmental historian of Kerala? Had they been engaging in the process of civilizing the wild and the people in it and thereby making them law abiding subjects within the state system? What was the ecological impact of the missionary work? These are some of the problems addressed in his paper.  In the afternoon, he chaired a session in which teachers and research scholars presented their papers.